HDTV Electronic Cinema: A New Dawn for Digital Projection and Mass Audiences

That is certain to the be case with HDTV. It is just too good to fail. Unlike its ancestor (standard television), it can serve a far wider field. HDTV may not get its best start in the home as did our old system. It has much more utility for the big screen--a screen big enough to accommodate a paying audience.

It will affordably serve mass audiences using electronic projectors that are clear and as bright as found in any film-based theater today. Without any new technical breakthroughs audiences of 300 to 1000 can easily be entertained with these sharp, powerful projectors. Signals can be beamed in from anywhere in the world using reliable digital transmission links to nearly anyplace in the world. The HDTV format for electronic cinema contains as much image information as one has come to expect from motion picture film--some say it's even more. Unbiased experts claim that the stability of HDTV images contributes to a superior viewing experience over that coming from the best of jumpy mechanical film projectors. The controversy is so intense since the call is so close. Add to all this the value of live presentations--something film cannot do--and you start to see the potential.

The electronic "theater" is clearly coming.

Enthusiasts give orations about the potential of electronic cinema until words fail them. "Flexibility" and "discovery" are two important words in electronic cinema's young vocabulary. As a production medium film is, well, pretty much discovered. Its tricks are all unveiled and doing something new in film is hard to come by. But electronic production (for use on film or as a new medium itself) is part of a roaring creative force just now making its digital presence felt around the world. From this renaissance digital fantasies like those in the new Star Wars are becoming visual icons to define the approaching age as much Bogart, Monroe, Gable, and Hanks defined the older one. Indeed, a new art form is being born that is as near-perfect for the creative geniuses of our times as has ever been invented.

Once these electronic projectors are past the prototype stage electronic theaters can be built in hundreds, even tens of thousands of locations. The world's population is about to double again within a single life span. What is today a condition of market saturation is tomorrow a critical shortage. Artists will work their magic from well-equipped studios and deliver hands-on their digital masterworks anyway to anywhere that digital travels. Television gave us our first riveting experiences as life's dramas unfolded simultaneously to millions hunched before little TV sets. Now a huge body of theatergoers the world-over may experience together in groups live dramatic events as they unfold. A great performance, such as when an artist reaches a transcendent moment in a performance, is no longer limited to a few ogling the stage, but can be felt across all boarders by thousands--even millions of theatergoers exactly as it happens. Should send chills up and down your spine just thinking about it. Well, "so what" you say? "What difference does that any of that make?" I will leave the answer to that one to the more articulate futurists and cultural guardians. They certainly know.

"Live performance" is just one exciting potential with electronic cinema. Well-crafted movie productions made under unheard of production budgets can justifiably be created to attract and transfix theatergoing audiences around the world. If the movie theater is to survive past the next few decades of new digital attractions it must compete with all of these options flooding into the markets now. Electronic cinema appears to be one answer for competing and becoming "time-relevant" around the world.

From the theater a path for introducing the value of high-performance television for home use is found. Demonstrations of DTV receivers have so far been disappointing due to lack of discipline and knowledge of set up, etc. Potential buyers are not seeing the potential and not taking to it. The big screen theater, running under more disciplined commercial standards, could be an ideal and reliable public demonstration ground for HDTV. The public understands the quality level of 35mm film and can understand HDTV quality no less so. Those programs fit for the big screen theater will soon-enough become the programming available by satellite, cable, and over-the-air to the HDTV home theater subscriber anyway. This may be years off, but in the mean time we can be enjoying electronic vaudeville, electronic Broadway, electronic story telling from the big screen in your home town theater(s). If not for that reason then consider that electronic cinema is the best exhibition method for keeping up with the exploding growth in populations predicted for the 21st century. Film infrastructure, or the lack of it, is already a limitation to Hollywood revenues. The economic return to Hollywood for employing easily installed electronic cinema can be enormous, if not completely beyond calculation. Jack Valenti made it clear in Congress that the willingness to pay for a feature is at its greatest from the publicity coming before the opening. With the Internet making all things known as they happen, the idea of delaying foreign distribution looks outdated. Publicity for Star Wars was as big around the world as in the US, but many places in the world will not get to see a print of it for months to come. How much is lost due to waning interest as the publicity dies down after the world premier stage? It will undoubtedly take an alluring financial prospect to bring Hollywood to embrace this means of distribution. They must avoid the temptation to cripple it with individual studio requirements (which can only discourage adoption). The ability to release simultaneously around the world with nothing more than a digital signal is certainly an idea worthy of serious investigation. If those in control of Hollywood don't do it now, someone else will. Whoever successfully develops an audience with revenue enough to attract writers, directors, actors can leave Hollywood executives with nothing better to do than cut up their treasured film prints for guitar picks. That, of course, won't happen. Hollywood is cautious about digital, even fearsome. But they know they have to stay up, as they did with sound. But getting there will be a political experience worthy of a new book on Hollywood lore.

Dale Cripps, June, 1991 and updated July 5, 1999
HDTV Newsletter

June 16, 1999